Humanity Gets Only a Bit Part

There’s bleak, and then there’s “Blasted.” Plays don’t come any darker or harsher than the astounding drama with which the 23-year-old Sarah Kane made her London debut at the Royal Court Theater in 1995. Reviewers then reacted with the anger and astonishment their Victorian predecessors displayed when faced with the scandal of Ibsen’s “Ghosts.” Wrote one critic, “Until last night I thought I was immune from shock in any theater.” Others simply called it “vile” and compared it to “having your whole head held down in a bucket of offal.”

Now “Blasted,” whose author died a suicide in 1999, has finally arrived in New York in a first-rate production that opened Thursday night at the Soho Rep on Walker Street, filling a significant gap in the history of contemporary theater here. And this is not  repeat not  one of those occasions on which you look back wonderingly at the naïveté of an earlier decade and think, “What on earth was all the fuss about?”

As impeccably staged by Sarah Benson and acted by a three-member ensemble with the bravery of hang gliders in a storm, Ms. Kane’s fierce study in the human instinct for inhumanity still registers off the Richter scale. “Enjoy it,” I overheard a man, who was obviously familiar with the play, saying to an arriving audience member. He then stopped to correct himself. “Well, maybe not enjoy. ...”

No, enjoy probably isn’t the mot juste for the experience of “Blasted,” which features acts of sexual assault and mutilation that would make Quentin Tarantino blanch. Yet there is deep satisfaction to be derived from this 90-minute work, which contracts and expands time beyond easy measuring. It’s the pleasure that comes from being compelled to follow an authentic and original voice into theatrical territory you have never visited before.

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Marin Ireland and Reed Birney in "Blasted," a 1995 play by Sarah Kane that was produced at Soho Rep in 2008.Credit...Simon Kane

I’m not talking about the gore that spatters this implosive tale of a bored, frightened journalist and the damaged woman he swears he loves. That “Blasted” still shocks isn’t because it traffics in visuals commonly associated with films like “Saw” and “Hostel.” It’s because those horrors are created by characters who are not, finally, so unlike us. Ms. Kane carefully and ruthlessly locates the urge to inflict pain and humiliation in the dull cloth of the everyday.

“Blasted” begins as a small albeit sordid love story of sorts. Ian (Reed Birney), a two-bit middle-aged tabloid writer, has arranged a reunion with his former mistress, Cate (Marin Ireland), in a hotel room in Leeds, in northern England. (The room, as designed with beige-toned anonymity by Louisa Thompson, is a place we’ve all stayed at; it looks as if it were created for the terminally hung-over.)

At first, all we register is the mix of eagerness (his), reluctance (hers) and discomfort (both his and hers) typical of such encounters. But a more sinister element makes itself felt. It would appear that the childlike Cate has an intelligence well below average; it also seems likely that her sexual relationship with Ian goes back to when she was a girl. She doesn’t want to go to bed with him, and even the mild foreplay Ian initiates feels coercive.

Sex, of several specific varieties, nonetheless occurs as the night continues, and both participants get hurt  I mean physically  in the process. Ian is the predator here, yet the humiliation that takes place is reciprocal. The simple-minded Cate has been conditioned to wound. Each winds up threatening the other with the gun Ian leaves lying around.

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Louis Cancelmi, left, portrays a soldier who breaks into a hotel room occupied by Reed Birney, who plays a tabloid reporter.Credit...Simon Kane

As the encounter goes through its faltering paces, matching the pained rhythms of Cate’s stuttering speech, we are made subliminally aware of a bigger world outside, of a hum of crowds and traffic and a glow of tainted light. (Matt Tierney’s sound design and Tyler Micoleau’s lighting are as subtly effective as any in town.)

Then there’s the way Ian talks, with racist contempt, of the dark-skinned immigrants who work in the hotel and throng the streets. He would, he says, bomb them all. Ian, whose professional specialty is reporting stories about serial killers and sexy girls for popular consumption, is a gin-belting chain smoker with ashy skin and a hacking, bowel-deep cough. He wears mortality like a dime-store aftershave.

What Ms. Kane has done in these scenes of ordinary squalor  and it amazes me that she could pull this off with such confidence in her early 20s  is set up a precise template for everything that follows. That’s saying a lot, since the rest of “Blasted” occurs in a haze of apocalyptic excess. A filth-encrusted soldier with an unplaceable foreign accent (Louis Cancelmi) breaks into Ian’s hotel room. And what he both describes and does brings to mind accounts of the most harrowing atrocities of the war in Bosnia.

Though “Blasted” is a work of moral outrage, it is never shrill or simplistic. Ms. Kane has not created a crude bestiary of two-legged animals. For all their degradation and cruelty, her characters are complex, ambivalent and specifically, identifiably human. In this sense, “Blasted” is an extraordinary act of empathy, an imagining of how people could reach the point where they behave like participants in Bosnian war crimes. Ms. Kane’s chilling contention is that it’s not such a stretch for any of us.

The cast is remarkable, both for its unflinching commitment to doing what the script demands (I hope Mr. Birney has a comforting home life) and for finding the dim but distinct glimmer of compassion in the play’s characters. Though there are spectacularly grisly (and spectacularly theatrical) images in “Blasted,” the ones that most stick with me are of a more delicate nature, as when the soldier stretches out his hand to Ian across the bed, with a glistening look of tentative trust and comradeship.

There’s little, for the record, that’s comradely about the ensuing rape of Ian by the soldier, though Mr. Cancelmi’s fit of coital weeping is as disturbing as anything in the play. It’s as if the natural circuitry of human impulses, from the basest to the finest, has been scrambled irreparably. Yet the play’s concluding moment makes clear that Ms. Kane can still see potential for goodness in people, that she hasn’t given up on life.

There is no hope at all in the last of her five completed plays, “Psychosis: 4:48,” seen in 2004 at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn in an exquisite production from the Royal Court (with Ms. Ireland). That tone poem of a work is about surrendering to death. “Blasted,” for all its despair, still contained a germ of hope  and quite a bit more than that for those of us who felt that a strong, singular sensibility had arrived in the English-speaking theater, one that we looked forward to watching develop. The loss of that opportunity hangs like a mourning veil over this vital and upsetting play.